Visual Aid

As more states conclude that students must study the Holocaust,
teachers wrestling with how best to convey such complex and emotionally
explosive material are finding help in an unlikely
place—Hollywood. Director Steven Spielberg's Holocaust education
organization, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is
helping five school districts develop curricula around a CD-ROM it's
produced that features videotaped oral histories from Holocaust
survivors.

The oral histories come from an archive the foundation started
building in 1994. After enduring early criticism for what some saw as
an attempt to tackle history with too few credentials and too much
drama, the foundation invited respected historians to help. Last year,
the foundation began customizing its resources for use in schools. More
than than 14,000 copies of the CD-ROM and an accompanying guide have
been sold to schools and the public at large since January 1999,
according to foundation officials.

Steven Spielberg—whose 1993 film Schindler's List
fueled the growing interest in Holocaust studies—has high hopes
for what the wrenching stories of survivors might accomplish with young
audiences. Speaking last spring at a meeting of the American
Association of School Administrators, the director said he hoped to
help "build a more tolerant and a more humane generation."

Currently, teachers from Chicago; Fairfax County, Virginia; Long
Beach, California; Portland, Oregon; and Sarasota, Florida, are in
various stages of developing curricula they wrote after spending three
days at the foundation's Los Angeles facility last June. The 41 middle
and high school teachers talked with survivors and historians and
learned how to use the interactive technology. For the next two years,
the foundation is also hosting monthly conference calls so the
districts can share how their instruction is going.

Teachers in other districts using the foundation's materials report
that students are excited and engaged by the CD-ROM, with its
live-action film clips and period music. Lisa Rybicki, a resource
teacher in the 150,000-student Palm Beach County school district in
Florida, says students there like the way they can interact with the
survivors' stories by clicking on timelines, historical overviews, and
maps of areas where key events took place, or by simply following each
person's tale to its end. They also connect strongly with the
narrators, Hollywood stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Winona Ryder, she
says.

Still, teachers developing lessons around the foundation materials
have their work cut out for them: Holocaust education is a complex
undertaking, say observers. Samuel Totten, a professor of curriculum
and instruction at the University of Arkansas college of education in
Fayetteville and a co-author of the teachers' guidelines for the U.S.
Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., says too many lessons
concentrate on the "what and where" of the Holocaust, rather than
exploring the complex forces and motivations that drove it, including
anti-Semitism, racism, extreme nationalism, and Germany's humiliating
defeat in World War I. "Teachers need to help students complicate
history in the best sense of the word," he says. "There is not a single
reason for most actions."

Others caution that the increased role of corporations and
foundations as providers of curriculum can work against an
appropriately critical approach to teaching the materials. Says Gilbert
Sewall, director of the New York City-based American Textbook Council,
which reviews the quality of history books: "There's a danger that
teachers become consumers, that they are not going to approach this
stuff in a critical or skeptical way, [and] that whatever is being
pitched to them, they will take home and use."

But teachers using the Shoah Foundation's materials say they
recognize the many difficulties of handling the subject well and are
focusing intently on creating the best curriculum they can. The
survivors' testimonies, they add, make a compelling history lesson even
more powerful. "The materials give us an ability to bring the
understanding of tolerance and prejudice to a deeper level," says
Laurie Shaw, a California educator.

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